Posts Tagged «ORNL»

IBM and Nvidia have been awarded $425 million by the US Department of Energy to build two brand-new supercomputers that leverage IBM’s Power8 CPUs and Nvidia’s upcoming Volta GPUs. The two computers — Summit, which will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra, built at Lawrence Livermore — will have peak performance of around 150 petaflops when they’re completed in 2017-2018.

One day, as I surfed the web on my laptop and lamented how long it takes a YouTube video to load, I found myself wondering if employees of the US government are also beholden to the same congestion and shoddy peering that affects everyone else on the internet. Surely, as hundreds of scientists at Fermi Lab near Chicago wait for petabytes of raw data to arrive from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, they don’t suffer interminable connection drops and inexplicable lag. And, as it turns out, they don’t.

Scientists at the DoE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have struck the battery mother lode: They’ve created an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery that is cheaper, less flammable, and has four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion batteries. Beyond the obvious gains from a four-fold increase in energy density, these sulfur-based batteries could play a key role in electric vehicles and airplanes, where the flammability of lithium-ion batteries is a serious concern.

The Titan supercomputer over at Oak Ridge National Laboratory already proudly wears the mantle of being the world’s most powerful supercomputer, but you know what they say about power. Now, the Titan is set to amass more power and obtain the mantle of having the world’s fastest storage system.

The USA has beaten back the Chinese and Japanese to reclaim pole position on the 39th Top500 list — the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. As a result, China is now promising to deliver a 100-petaflops by 2015 — some two years before the rest of the world is expected to reach such lofty heights.

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